Materials that react beneficially with hydrogen peroxide are needed for a wide variety of applications. For laundry detergents, for example, substances that reacts with hydrogen peroxide to provide improved stain bleaching (versus peroxide alone or versus alternatives) are highly desirable. Hydrogen peroxide alone does not provide sufficient bleaching on all stains of interest, often does not provide sufficient stain bleaching at low temperatures, or does not bleach quickly enough at elevated temperatures to match the performance of existing alternatives. Current organic activators for hydrogen peroxide, such as peracid generators currently used for solid laundry detergents, typically operate stoichiometrically, providing economic challenges to practical implementation. It is known that many transition metal ions catalyze the decomposition of H2O2 and H2O2-liberating per-compounds, such as sodium perborate. It has also been suggested that transition metal salts together with a coordinating or chelating agent can be used to activate peroxide compounds so as to make them usable for satisfactory bleaching at lower temperatures or to provide enhanced bleaching performance at a given temperature. Current commercial metal-based activators suffer from deficiencies in one or more of the following areas: poor bleaching (oxidative) activity, fabric safety, poor solubility, prohibitively expensive economics, poor environmental fate profiles. The ability to more effectively use hydrogen peroxide (whose sole degradation products are water and oxygen) could reduce the use of potentially harmful chlorine-based bleaches e.g. sodium hypochlorite for cleaning, or chlorine dioxide for pulp and paper. Iron (Fe), manganese (Mn), cobalt (Co), and copper (Cu) are relatively inexpensive metals. A hydrogen peroxide activation catalyst employing any of these metals can provide significant economic and health/environment/safety advantages compared to current existing alternatives. Peroxide activators based on other metals are also of interest.